Home Improvement
Continued
Forging Partnerships
VicUrban’s successful adoption of Oracle CRM On Demand reflects careful planning from the earliest stages. The VicUrban IT organization’s involvement was critical, but so was that of the company’s sales and marketing teams.
“All the sales staff were involved in demonstrations where they talked about what types of fields we needed to have in the system, what data we needed to collect, how we should be collecting it, and how they dealt with customers,” says Rappolt. Marketing managers were also involved, to strategize on the types of reports they wanted and how those reports should be automatically generated.
Involving VicUrban’s call center was another critical move. “The call center doesn’t get paid unless members utilize the CRM system to register any call that comes to VicUrban,” Rappolt notes. “So we have a better handle on the number of calls that come into VicUrban on a daily basis.”
Similarly, in the near term, members of the VicUrban sales team will not receive their commissions unless they use the new CRM system. “At first, we thought that was a pretty big stick to hold over their heads,” confesses Rappolt. “But we haven’t implemented it yet, and they’re already doing it. So we now get much more-accurate sales and marketing information all the way through the process.”
Getting buy-in throughout the company fortifies overall CRM effectiveness. But it has a vital secondary benefit: it also enables a company to speak with a single voice, building the corporate brand. An enterprise must act as a single organization to ensure consistency. According to the Gartner report, “Most customers do not expect to be delighted at each interaction with a company—they often value consistency more. The problem is that the customer may interact with many different parties as part of his or her business with a company.”
The siloed approach to interacting with customers can sabotage their experience. Although VicUrban has many offices, each site now uses the same approach to customer service, thereby presenting a seamless customer interface. Agents ask each customer the same set of questions, and the process is standardized at all stages. “That’s a big change from a year ago,” says Rappolt. “CRM has given us the ability to do that.”
When customers have a dependably satisfying experience, they return again and again—even when it comes to a business like VicUrban’s, where purchases are long-term investments. As people enter different phases of their lives, says Rappolt, their housing requirements change. Customer loyalty, engendered through positive, memorable customer experiences, forms the linkage between the customer experience and the bottom line. That loyalty is what the company relies on to bring customers back.
Oracle was key to VicUrban’s CRM challenge. “We worked hard to get something that was quick. Oracle was great, because it was a system that you could just plug in. We didn’t have to design the whole system ourselves—we just refined it with staff input,” Rappolt says. “It’s been a great business decision for VicUrban.”
For More Information
Oracle CRM On Demand
How Improving the Customer Experience Can Reduce Spending
Joanna Holmes is a freelance writer focusing on technology and business topics.
